


Egyptian Water

by tawg



Category: Hot Fuzz (2007)
Genre: Angst, Gen, crime/myst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-24
Updated: 2011-04-24
Packaged: 2017-10-18 14:46:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/189978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tawg/pseuds/tawg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A child goes missing, Danny struggles with his own parent-related issues, and there’s at least one area in which Nicholas isn’t being completely honest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Monday

Danny stared at the photograph on his desk. It had a crack through the glass, and the frame looked worse for wear. It was probably the cruddiest thing in the new station house, barring its occupants. Danny’s own, youthful face smiled back at him. The photo had sat on his father’s desk in the past, and on the mantle piece at home before that. Danny had thought it lost in the explosion, just more rubble. But Nicholas had slid quietly over to him on Danny’s first day back on duty, and pressed it into his hands. Most days Danny wished he hadn’t.

Nicholas was on the phone, his voice blending in with humming computers and ringing phones as part of the background score. Every now and then Danny could make out words, questions like “when” and “how”. Nicholas wasn’t writing anything down, no sloping scribbles in his notebook, which meant that it probably wasn’t anything important. In fact, judging from the way Nicholas was slumped in his chair, staring at a point somewhere along the top of his office wall, it was probably just London calling.

Danny stared at his mother’s face. He’d stopped mourning her for a while. For most of his twenties, actually. But not all things have the decency to end and stay ended.  
“Is it stupid for me to hate her?” Danny had asked Nicholas once, “I mean, what with everything that’s happened because of her?”  
“I think it’s stupid to hate anyone,” Nicholas had replied. “But just because it’s stupid doesn’t stop it from happening.”

That had been a while ago, a month maybe. Last week Danny had put flowers on his mother’s grave for the first time in years. It was symbolic, not that Danny knew exactly what it meant. In the background, the murmur of Nicholas on the phone was ended with a click that was distinctive only in that it was caused by Nicholas, and replaced by the comforting rhythm of a call being answered at the front desk. The same “when” and “how” questions were asked, with the occasional “what” thrown in as well. Danny chewed idly on the cap of his pen, and wondered what his mum would have thought of Nicholas.

The sound of Turner passing on some news, and Doris and Tony swearing in response brought Danny back to himself. Nicholas, having hung up the phone and gotten halfway through scribbling something to himself, looked up and tensed.

It was Tony who spoke up. “That were Mister Tanner. Their youngest has been snatched.”

Nicholas stood up so fast that the feet of his chair scraped harshly against the floorboards. “Get the Andes down here. I want Doris and Wainwright to go talk to the Tanners, and I need Cartwright, Walker, and Danny to go scout the area and talk to neighbours.”

There was a loud clatter as the Andes nearly fell down the stairs in their haste, the pair of them struggling to stand tall and look professional once they were in Nicholas’ line of sight. The painful straightness of their spines was partly a matter of taking the piss, but mostly because Nicholas could be damn scary once he started yelling.

Get a map of the area, get a description of the kid, of anyone seen, of any suspect unseen. Timeline, profiles, no sirens, yes to the fluoro jackets, find a motive, find a suspect, do your jobs.

“Well then?” Nicholas said expectantly. “Get moving!”

There was a mad scurry, but it was organised. Danny was out of his chair and halfway to the patrol car, keys in hand and hat on head before he realised it. Being a police officer was more instinctive now, his hands knew what to grab and his eyes knew what to take note of without patient prompting. The thoughts of moments earlier were firmly pushed to the back of his mind, where they belonged.

*

One of the big differences between the old style of policing and the new style of policing in Sandford was the amount of paper used. The old way involved one or two people making a note, losing the note, and then photocopying said note if it was, firstly, ever seen again and, secondly, a bit of a giggle. The new way involved maps with all sorts of lines – that were completely relevant, but also mostly squiggly – drawn on them, a timeline written out on the whiteboard, and photographs and post-it notes with relevant names stuck in loose conformations on the walls.

Danny suspected that the only reason that the new style yielded more efficient results than the old style was because the main room looked so busy and full that everyone assumed that everyone else was working like mad on the situation. And because no one wanted to be caught slacking off, the end result was that everyone did work themselves to near-exhaustion because they were all competing. When Danny posed this theory to Nicholas, Nick had given him a panicked look, and then made Danny swear to never share his conclusions with anyone else. “It’ll stop working if they know what’s going on.”

One Turner was attempting to correlate the statements of neighbours with the initial recount of events provided by the Tanners – Betty Tanner was bathing little Lynda Tanner, left the bath house to get more soap and came back to find her gone. Doris was in interview room three taking the statements from said neighbours while the Andes stood at the door, frowning and occasionally making notes.

The other Turner stood in the middle of the room, hands on hips. “The general gist that I am getting from all this,” he said tiredly, “is that no one knows nuthin’.”

“Which means,” Nicholas said, scrubbing a hand over his short hair, “that we’re missing something, someone is lying, or a baby got lost behind the couch.”

“That hasn’t happened around here for a good seven years or so,” Tony replied. “Little Tommy Wilshire crawled inside his parent’s fold-out couch and couldn’t get back out. Only found him when his uncle came up to look and nearly mushed him getting the couch open for a snooze.”

Nicholas blinked blearily at Tony for a moment. He still struggled a bit with just accepting about eighty per cent of the station house anecdotes. “How long will it take to organise a warrant to search the property?”

“Ooh, well, we don’t really need one, see, since the Tanners have opened their place up and all.”

Nicholas’ mouth became a hard, patient line. “We don’t need a search warrant at this juncture to look for their missing child on their property,” he conceded. “But we’ll need one in order to perform an adequate search for a body.”

There followed the kind of pause that liked to convey that yes, everyone had heard that, and no, no one liked the implication behind it at all, and that even though the warrant was now already in the works, no more of this avenue of thinking is to be discussed again. Ever. It was a highly communicative pause, and others like it had confused Nicholas for a long time when he first came to Sandford. Danny could tell by the tight line of Nick’s shoulders that he had understood this one.

While London policing often involved addressing the most distressing possibilities as early in the investigation as possible, Sandford policing relied on an optimistic outlook and a lot of denial.

*

It was late afternoon by the time Nicholas had everyone he could spare back out searching. Danny was on phone-and-whipping-boy duty, which meant that he got to reassure the few curious people who called and go chasing after anything that Nicholas needed and couldn’t find. Andy was hunched at a corner computer, transcribing the few recorded statements they had, and Nicholas was stalking around the office, passing information through the radio as it was needed. Nicholas had thought to make Danny look up everything from a topographical map of the Tanner farm, to historical records and building permits. None of which were much help, but it did mean that every time Tony fell down a ditch Nicholas knew exactly which ditch it was.

“Anything if interest yet, Andy?” Nicholas asked, pouring over one map and ignoring the mug of tea that Danny had pointedly set down next to it.

“Yeah, I happen to find it really interesting that you have all the bobbys out there detecting things, and me in here playing secretary. But aside from that,” he added hastily in the face of Nicholas’ glare, “the only thing that really stands out is that no one’s heard or seen anything. Not until Greg Tanner started yelling all over the place. He rang us once Ethyl Mitchell calmed him down.”

Nicholas bit at his lip, pausing in his sharpie-fuelled interpretative cartography. “That is interesting,” he said softly.

“Your tea’s getting cold,” Danny replied.

*

The search got called off at nine, after Tony twisted an ankle in a ditch and Andrew fell in after him from laughing so hard. Another hour was spent full of ruling things out and listing new places to look and people to canvas before it was conceded there was nothing more that could be done without a few hours sleep, a fresh outlook, and other such buzz phrases. Danny walked Nicholas home.

“So, what was that call about then?” Danny asked after a comfortable silence that lasted five blocks.

“What call?”

“The one you had in your office, just before we got word…”

“Oh,” said Nicholas, suddenly finding a stretch of wall to be interested in. “That was nothing. Just a family thing.”

Danny went still, and held his breath for a moment. “Didn’t think you talked much.”

“Letters, mostly,” Nicholas replied absently. “Actual speaking is reserved for emergencies.”

Danny licked his lips. “And there’s an emergency?”

“Well I should think so,” Nicholas said with a snort. “We do have a five-month old child missing.”

Danny rolled his eyes. “I meant an emergency with your family.”

“This is me,” Nicholas said nodding at his front gate. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Danny stood at the fence until the green front door was closed and a light was on in the kitchen. When he went home he fell into an awkward sleep, pretending that nothing was wrong.


	2. Tuesday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The investigation continues and, as with so many other things in Sandford, no headway is made.

Danny was at the station early the next morning, despite having spent the night on the couch with the DVD screensaver for company. Nicholas was there too, sitting at Danny’s desk with a piece of paper under one hand, staring blankly into space.

“You right there?” Danny asked cautiously, being careful not to sound like he was being cautious. All men are secretly this insecure and complex.

Nicholas looked at Danny. “Have you been in touch with your father yet?”

Danny stopped short of his own desk, dumbfounded. “No,” he said in a hardening voice. “And what exactly would I say if I were? “Hi dad, I’m pretty sure I hate you for being a murdering monster; how’s the food?” I hardly think that that’ll mend any bridges.”

“I hardly think that’s what you really think of him,” Nicholas replied calmly, staring at his fingers as he dragged them over the slightly rough finish of Danny’s desk. “If it were, you’d be able to say it and move on.”

Danny grabbed the chair from Walker’s desk and violently slung it round, sitting across from Nicholas. He leant across his own desk, casting a dark shadow over doodles and diagrams and a single photo. “How about, instead of spending your free time poking at my family relations,” he said in a low, angry voice, “you sit and work at your own?”

Nicholas stared at Danny for a moment longer, before snatching at a piece of paper on Danny’s desk, cramming it into his pocket as he stood up. “I want you to double-check the work the Turner’s did over at the Swan and the pub. If there are any non-locals in Sandford I want them here within the hour.” Then he went into his office and slammed the door behind him.

“Prick,” Danny muttered.

*

The day was spent tensely, full of short sentences and heavy silences.

“Doris, you lift any prints from the scene?”

“None but the Tanner’s. Sorry, Chief.”

“Cartwright, get anything new from today’s interview?”

“If by ‘new’ you mean ‘helpful’, no.”

“Any word on similar cases in the surrounding areas?”

“Nobody’s tellin’ me nuthin’.”

And then Nicholas would stare at things just behind Danny’s head and pace like a caged lion. Finally he sunk into deep thought, only emerging to accept a biscuit and ask the room in general: “Has anyone talked to the kid? The eldest?”

*

Rory Turner was “nearly-nine”, and gazed around the interrogation room with wide-eyed amazement. The initial plan was to talk to him in the station kitchen, but he had begged to be taken to where “all the bad guys spilled their guts and then cried, please”. Kids these days. Doris sat next to him, with Andrew Wainwright across the table, attempting to ask questions between Rory’s own demands for information.

“So is there were you made them confess? Right here?” Rory asked keenly, twisting in his seat to look at the ceiling.

“Well,” Doris said awkwardly, “it were mostly the facilities in Buford, and a lot was done in the interview room of the Bath prison. Do you remember yesterday?”

“It was Monday,” Rory said definitely. “Did anyone ever lunge over the table and try to strangle you with the cuffs? Did you ever have to cuff someone’s feet as well? With the chains that connect them all up?”

“No,” Doris said. “Can you remember anything out of the-”

“Tina Davis, her big sister said that her boyfriend came in here to pay for a parking ticket, and he reckoned there were blood stains on the floor.” Rory looked under the table, between his own swinging feet. “How do you clean up blood stains?”

“You use some soft drink,” Andrew cut across Doris’ sensible answer. “But you have to be careful that it doesn’t eat up the carpet. You ever got blood on your clothes?”

“Last week,” Rory said. “I feel over at school, and hurt my knee.”

Andrew raised his eyebrows, looking impressed. “Can I see?”

Rory obligingly put his leg up on the table, pulling his jeans up to show of the dark scab with a proud grin.

“Wow,” said Andrew, taking his sunglasses off for a closer look. “Could you see the bone or anythin’?”

“No,” said Rory, looking rather put out about the lack of bone observation. “Mum yelled at me for ripping my pants though, then I went and played with Buster. Buster’s my dog.”

“Do you play with Buster a lot?” Andrew asked, chin in palm.

Rory nodded. “I can’t play inside, because it wakes stupid Lynda up, and then I get sent outside anyway. It’s better outside. No one yells if you’re muddy, long as you’re only muddy outside.”

Andrew looked sympathetic. “Does your mum yell at you a lot?”

Rory paused for a long time, before looked up at the mirrored window that stretched across one wall. The light on inside the observation room cancelled out the mirrored effect, and showed Nicholas looking bored and filling out some paperwork.

“She yells more when Lynda cries,” he said at last. “Dad yells too.”

“What do they yell about?”

Rory looked down at the table top, and scowled. “Lynda always cries. She’s no fun, and she’s stupid.”

“All little sister’s are stupid,” Andrew said in agreement, ignoring a glare from Doris. “Parent’s are stupid too.”

Rory nodded.

“Do you want to try on my sunglasses?” Andrew offered.

“Wow. Real detective’s sunglasses?” Andrew nodded. “Do you have to wear them at night too?” Rory asked as he slipped them on.

Andrew nodded seriously. “If you’re on a case, you have to wear them all the time. It’s so that if you have to do something that’s not by the book, that might sometimes seem a little bit wrong, no one can prove that it was you.” Andrew shared a look with Doris. “So no one gets in trouble.” He admired Rory in the sunglasses for a moment, before playing with the jug of water on the table. “Did your parents yell a lot yesterday?”

Rory went still behind the sunglasses, then nodded again.

“Can you tell me what happened to make them yell?”

Rory shrugged, and looked up at the mirrored window again. “I was playing with Buster, and Lynda was crying. She always cries.”

Andrew’s mouth twisted in sympathy, and then interest. “Where were you and Buster playing, Rory?”

“We were behind the bath house. There’s a jungle there, because that’s where mum pours the baby water out and it makes it grow.”

“Where was Lynda?”

“In the bath.” Rory paused to push the sunglasses further up his nose. He looked a little like a fly behind the giant lenses. “She’s too little to wash herself, so mum does it.”

“Does your mum talk to Lynda when she washes her?”

Rory shrugged.

Andrew leaned close, like it was just the two of them in the room. “What does she say?”

Rory put his hands on the sides of the sunglasses, pressing them up against his face. “Everyone always tells Lynda to shut up. Except mum say’s ‘please’, too.”

Andrew twitched his top lip in thought, and spoke gently. “What happened then? What made the yelling start?”

Rory looked at the window, the tabletop, and then his hands. “Lynda stopped crying. I was in the jungle, so I couldn’t hear well.”

“Of course,” Andrew replied.

“She was quiet, and then mum was quiet. I thought they’d gone inside. Maybe they did.” Rory dropped his voice. “I heard footsteps. And then mum started crying.”

“How long were they quiet for?”

Rory shrugged again. “A while.”

Doris opened her mouth to press further, but Andrew waved her away. “What happened when your mum started crying?”

Rory scrubbed the back of his hand under his nose, and the sunglasses looked blankly across at Andrew. “She started yelling. She got loud. And then dad came, and he started yelling.” He bit his lip. “I ran away, hid in the trees until dad came looking for me.”

“Rory,” Andrew said gently. “Did you ever see what happened in the bath house?”

Rory, staring at the tabletop, shook his head.

“Can you remember what your parents were saying when they were yelling?”

Rory shook his head again, dislodging the sunglasses slightly.

“Rory?” Andrew waited until Rory lifted his head a little, peering out from under his fringe and above the tops of the sunglasses. “You’re very brave for being interrogated like this.”

Rory looked hopeful. “Really?”

“Course,” Andrew said with a smile. “You haven’t begged for mercy at all.” Rory smiled timidly back.

*

Tony paced a small circle in the middle of the bull pit. “So… what do we think?”

“Was it possible the kid was lying?” Andy asked.

Andrew shook his head. “Not outright. I think the outline is the truth.”

“Think he was keeping quiet on some things?” Doris asked.

Andrew shrugged. “No kid wants to repeat what their parents say when they’re fighting.

“Or when their parents are scared,” Andy added. “You should’ve pushed harder. We’ve got less than half a real recount, you know that.”

“I know that the kid’s family is falling apart and that he’s not exactly in any state to handle some rough treatment by us,” Andrew snapped back.

Andy nodded and slouched back on Walker’s desk. He waved a dismissive hand. “Doesn’t refute any part of the Tanner’s account at any rate.”

“Doesn’t corroborate any of it either,” Danny said sharply. “Did either of the Tanner’s ever mention Lynda being difficult, the fighting and that?”

The Turner’s flipped through various printouts. “Nooo. Just the basic ‘most beautiful little girl ever’ stuff,” said one.

“Neighbour mentioned, uhm, ‘thing’s’ve been strained, a bit’. That was just one neighbour though, and that was Ms Hymes who’s a little bit hungry for gossip.”

“The house is set pretty far into the block,” Nicholas noted, turning away from Danny and staring at his beloved maps. “Would the neighbours have even heard anything? And if the Tanner’s were having problems at home, would they have told anyone?”

“It’s a small town,” said Tony in a rare moment of authority. “If you’re having problems with your spouse or offspring, there’s always someone told, and usually it gets passed on from there.”

“Khinez wuzpars,” Walker said in summary.

*

Watching Nicholas strip after shift – and Danny tried not to make a habit of it, but their lockers were right across from one another and Danny always managed to catch sight of Nick out of the corner of his eye – Danny paid attention to all the things that Nicholas pulled out of his pockets. Ephemera, Nicholas had explained, if relevant to a crime should be kept close to the evidence, rather than scattered across somebody’s living room. The piece of paper that had been abducted from Danny’s desk sat for a crumpled moment on the locker shelf between Nicholas’ mobile and his deodorant, before being buried once again in Nicholas’ pocket.

It was folded into thirds, and had Danny’s name written on it. In Nicholas’ handwriting.

Nicholas was slouched against the wall of the station when Danny came out. “Walk you home?” he offered, staring at the toes of his shoes.

Danny shrugged. “Alright then.”

*

“So,” said Danny as he sank back into his couch, “you ever going to tell me about this family thing?”

Nicholas shrugged, and sipped at his glass of water. They weren’t drinking, which Danny suspected was going to make things difficult. “It’s,” Nicholas stopped, and stared through his water and through the glass, at the fine prints that the pads of his fingers were leaving behind. “It’s nothing important,” he concluded dully. “Just a thing.”

“Thing?” Danny asked with a smile.

“Event,” Nicholas conceded. “I need to be in London on Saturday, that’s all.”

“Who called then, your sister?” Nicholas nodded. Danny smiled, and nudged him. “Dropping you a line twice in one year, that’s got to be some kind of record. Step in the right direction and all that. She send you the Christening snaps?”

“Yeah,” Nicholas said hollowly. He shifted beside Danny, sinking down into the cushions. “You know,” he said carefully, pulling his fingers across the glass in his hands and creating streaky patters, “I’m envious of the relationship that you have. With your dad.”

Danny snorted. “There is no relationship, in case you’ve forgotten. Not any more.”

Nicholas shrugged, engrossed in his patterning. “He still sends you birthday cards. Even if you don’t read them.”

Danny stared hard at Nicholas. “You been going through my mail or something?”

“No, I recognised his handwriting. Have you even opened it?”

“No, and I’m not going to,” Danny said with harsh finality. He turned painful brown eyes to Nicholas. “Why do you keep brining this up all of a sudden? Why can’t you just let it go, like I’m tryin’ to?”

Nicholas considered the question, and sighed. “Because I think, for all the bad things that your father has done, there’s a part of him that has done good things too. And that part of him shouldn’t be punished.”

“There’s nothing that man has done that has any good in it!” Danny said, his voice cracking.

Nicholas stared at Danny, at Danny’s ragged breathing and white knuckles. “He had a hand in making you who you are, Danny,” he said gently. “And I will always be in his debt for that.”

Nicholas placed his half-empty glass of water on the coffee table, and left without saying anything more. Danny stared at it for a long time, wishing he didn’t feel so empty inside.


	3. Wednesday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Nicholas takes an interesting course of action, and Danny can't shut off.

Nicholas stood on the path to the bath house, his breath missing slightly in the chill morning air, and surveyed the sprawling land. What had once been a farm had sold land until it became a hobby farm, and then sold what could be sold and leased what could be leased until it was too small to be a farm at all and starting to be run over by saplings and wild shrubbery. Danny watched from the other side of the bath house as Nicholas hooked his hands into the front of his stab vest. Nicholas glanced over, Danny looked away, and they both went back to watching Walker and Saxon wander back and forth between fruit trees and vegetable plots.

Tony stumbled up beside Nicholas, trying to manage the uneven ground with his arms entangled in a large map. Nicholas wordlessly took it from him, folded it down, and rapped on their location with a knuckle. Tony mumbled an embarrassed thanks, before making an effort to straighten up. “You really think we’ll find anything?” he asked.

“If there’s anything to find,” Nicholas replied vaguely. He had a furrow between his eyebrows, the one the indicated that while his mind was focused on the problem at hand, he was still a million miles away. Danny knew the various lines of Nicholas’ face like he knew his way to the pub, but he was still surprised every morning by the lines on his own.

Danny and Tony jerked as Nicholas suddenly raised a hand, pointing to where Walker was hauling on the leash and Saxon had his nose buried in a compost heap. “Does that mean anything?” Nicholas asked wearily.

“Shouldn’t think so,” Tony supplied. “It’s a bit of a bad habit we still haven’t trained him out of.”

Nicholas tucked his hand back into the warmth of his stab vest, and went back to his intent absentness. It was a different line between his eyebrows now, less of a puzzle and more of a frown.

“So…” Tony paused for a little too long, looking a little too uncomfortable before he finally continued. “What do you think then, Chief?”

Nicholas eyed the war between Saxon and walker in amongst the vegetables a while longer. “I think I’m going to regret this,” he sighed at last.

Danny let his eyes fall shut in a grimace.

“What’s that then?” Tony asked.

“I’ve had enough of this run-around,” Nicholas said in his brisk inspector’s voice, ignoring the cringe from Tony beside him. “Take Missus Tanner in.”

*

“This is hopeless,” Andy moaned as the sun began to set outside.

“It does seem an awful lot like a waste of time,” Doris agreed. “Not that I don’t think that there’s something there. Just that we won’t be getting it from her.”

Nicholas, biting absently at his thumbnail, kept quiet.

“Got to be something there,” Andrew said firmly. “No one get’s that upset about a few harmless questions without there being a reason for it.”

“Those weren’t harmless questions, Andy,” Doris said sternly. “You can’t go into a room with a girl who’s just lost her baby, and then imply that her husband of near-twenty years might be smackin’ her about a bit without expecting some kind of a slap in return.”

“She tried to smash the two-way glass!” Andrew replied throwing his hands up in the air. “That’s a little bit of an over-reaction if you ask me.” Andy had two cigarettes in his mouth, lighting them. He passed one to Wainwright and took a long drag on his own.

“It was a bad call, yeah, fine,” Andy admitted. “But she’s never gotten through the story herself, so there’s got to be something there, right?”

“You mean something aside from a mother in mourning?” Doris volleyed back.

“Well, why not?” Andy asked, waving a hand about and smoothing streams of smoke through the air. “If the kid’s a brat and family’s a bit screwy anyway, why can’t there be more to it than what’s on the surface?”

Nicholas’ eyes flicked up at that, though his thumbnail remained firmly between his front teeth.

“We got no suspects, no real series of events aside from what Greg gave us – not even his kid confirmed that,” Andy continued.

“And we dunno how much of that he was told to say,” Andrew added gruffly. “Unless something amazing happens, we’re stuck with nothing and more nothing.”

Danny – feeling the heat of Nicholas standing behind his chair and doing his best to ignore it – stared at the closed door to the interview room. “Is it normal for girls to get that upset? I mean, I know she’s already got one layer of upset and we probably ain’t helping and all. It’s just that I didn’t know that people tried to hit detectives with chairs like that in real life.”

“You been lending her your DVDs then, Danny?” Andy joked. He noticed Nicholas staring at him, and hung his head quickly.

“That’s what you get,” Tony said sternly, entering with a tray laden with mugs of tea. “You bachelors just don’t understand the bonds of marriage. You can’t go around implying something about one half without the other takin’ it personal like.”

Andrew raised his hands with an exasperated sigh. “Look, we all know there’s something not being said. We know it, the Tanner’s know it, the whole bloody town knows it. So what’s the problem with pushing a little?”

“The problem is that you two have all the tact of a brick to the face,” Doris scolded. “You got no sympathy towards her.”

“She’s right,” Tony said with a nod, his hands still full of tray and tea. “You can’t imagine what it must be like to lose a child let alone what she’s actually going through. I don’t reckon anyone in this room does. And that’s why we’re going to need a small miracle before we can even begin to think about getting anywhere.”

Nicholas looked up from Andy as the mugs were passed around. “Did anyone think to turn the tape off?”

The question was met with a row of blank faces. Nicholas pushed away from the wall and grabbed a mug of tea, snatching the sugar bowl from Tony on his way out.

*

Betty Tanner, a woman older than most people expected, was sniffing against a knuckle when Nicholas quietly entered the interview room. “I’d like to apologise,” he said in a low voice, “for the way you’ve been treated by my officers.”

Betty placed a hand over her eyes and let out a long, shaking sigh. “I suppose I’ve just made things worse, haven’t I?”

Nicholas set the cup of tea on the table in front of her, and dragged a chair around so that he was sitting at right angles from her. “Not at all,” he said soothingly, ignoring the way she shied away from him. “There is not a single person in this station who doesn’t believe that you were in your right to put my detectives into line. They’re all rather shamefaced at the moment.” There was a long pause during which Nicholas became intensely interesting in the backs of his hands. “I can leave you be, if you like,” he offered at last. “I just wanted to make sure that you’re alright. As alright as you can be.”

Betty stared at her hands as she wrung them together, stared at the table and the tea and everything that wasn’t Nicholas. “I’m sorry,” she murmured shakily. “For taking up so much time, and for… for all this mess. I do it a lot, I’m afraid. Little Betty Baker, making a mess of things.”

“Baker was your maiden name?”

Betty nodded. “My parents are over in Buford. Betty Baker from Buford. You know what people these parts think of Buford. I’d have given anything to be Elizabeth. Or Lizzie even.” She lifted her two hands to her mouth, as if to physically stop her rambling.

“My sister’s middle name is Elizabeth,” Nicholas offered at last. “My mother was a bit of a monarchist.”

Betty laughed hollowly from behind clasped hands. “I had the same problem. I always told myself, ‘when I grow up and have kids, there’s not a chance they’re going to be named after a sodding bunch of Royals’.” She looked up fearfully. “That’s not treason, is it? Speaking ill?”

Nicholas shook his head with a soft smile. “So you always wanted to have kids?”

Betty dropped her hands down to the cool table top, laying sweaty palms upon it before playing with her mug of tea. “Not really,” she finally admitted. In the stretch of silence that followed, more rambles built up on her tongue before finally pouring forth.

“But it’s expected out here,” she said dully. “If you don’t have kids then it’s because there’s something wrong with you. If you don’t get married, it’s because there’s something wrong with you. Greg wanted kids though. Eight or so boys.” Betty’s head dipped a little lower, the fluorescent lights in the room catching on the few strands of silver in her hair. “I guess I put that dream out of his head fairly quick.”

Nicholas leaned his elbows on the table, and examined his own thumbs. “You seem to have had Rory fairly late in life, if you don’t mind me saying.”

Betty swiped a hand under her nose and stared at the mug of tea on the table. “We never… The problem was at my end, I think. Because I just… My heart wasn’t in it, maybe. You shouldn’t have kids if you can’t love them.” She laughed hollowly. “God knows why I’m telling you all this muck.”

Nicholas shrugged, picking at the skin around his thumbnail. “Once you’re on the outside, I think it’s very hard for anything you do to seem right.” Betty looked at Nicholas out the corner of her eye, and Nicholas politely gave no indication that he noticed. “It doesn’t matter how… how good you are, how much good you do.”

“We’re always not good enough,” Betty finished. Nicholas looked up, and offered her a sheepish smile.

“Rory’s a good boy,” he offered. “Greg must be proud of him.”

Betty sniffled. “He was always sick growing up. Rory that is, not Greg. Young for his age, like. Even now, you put him next to other boys and he’s not… He was premature, you see. Complications. I remember everyone was walking on eggshells all through the pregnancy. I never thought-” Betty shuddered as more tears came unbidden to her eyes, and her nose reddened. “How could anyone ever imagine that it could hurt so bad? It was. It was being ripped open. For two days, being ripped open and screaming and screaming.” She pressed a shaking hand over one eye. “And then Greg wanted me to do it again.”

Nicholas reached out as if to console her, but thought better, and awkwardly let his hand come to rest on the cold metal tabletop.

“And, and it was worse still,” Betty continued. “Because Rory. Rory was always small, and always sick, and always tired. But he slept at least, and he knew me. But Lynda,” she paused. “I don’t suppose you have much to do with babies, being an Inspector and all.”

“My sister had her first child in January. I went to visit for the Christening but…” Nicholas pulled his wallet out of his pocket, and uncertainly displayed a stereotypical photograph of a confused pink blob in a bobble hat. “She’s a bit picky with strangers, apparently. I must have held her for three hours straight, and she never stopped crying.”

Betty attempted a shuddering laugh, running a forefinger along the curve of a photographed cheek. “Just like Lynda, then. You’d think… you’d think that they’d have to sleep sometime. That she’d just tire herself out. She tired the rest of us out. A few months old and Greg’s already talking about our third. And if she ever got settled for a single minute, Rory would come bounding in. I had to wash her outside because her crying echoed in the bathroom too much. I’d get migraines so bad it was like one of my eyes was bleeding. And then Greg.”

Nicholas watched, still and silent, as Betty took a resolute mouthful of cooling tea.

“All he wanted was kids. Strong children that he could love and be a father to… Imagine, coming home every day to a daughter who’s screaming, and a mother who’s screaming, and of course Rory is nowhere to be found because… because we’re all just so… so sick of it. And I’m meant to fix it. That’s what I’m meant to do but I never know how, or what to say, or…” Betty trailed off a little, choking on the hundreds of tiny confessions that were trying to crawl up her throat, catching and falling back into her lungs with each shuddering breath.

Nicholas shifted his hand on the table, fingers resting across the face of his niece. He stared intently at the half-obscured photograph. When he finally spoke, it was so soft and gentle that it was more of a suggestion of sound than anything else.

“What happened in the bath house?”

“I… I needed soap. I always forget things, make a mess of them. So I asked Greg to hold her for me.”

Betty skittered her hand over to Nicholas’, and gripped it until her knuckles went white and Nicholas’ fingertips pooled with red.

“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” she whispered. “He was tired. He was just so tired. She was too heavy for us to hold any more.”

*

In the tiny room on the other side of the mirrored glass was filled with the dense air cause by too many people pressing their noses against a window.

Andy was the first to break the thick silence that nearly drowned out the juddering sobs fingering through from the interview room, his low voice bouncing off the glass while the fog of his breath remained. “How the fuck did he do that then?”

Tony and Andrew shook their heads in response. Doris had one palm pressed against the glass, and the other clamped over her mouth.

“He’s wasted,” Andrew finally muttered. “Wasted on fucking inspectoring, that’s for sure.”

Danny had backed further and further away from the scene as it had unfolded, his shoulder blades digging into the wall holding him up despite the thick scaffolding of his stab vest. “Why the hell did he do that?” he muttered, fighting against a strange, heavy tightness in his chest. “There’s no way this is regulation.”

He watched from between the heads of officers - separate from him, somehow - as Nicholas slowly reached out and turned the tape recorder off with a painfully audible click. Betty Tanner’s sobs turned into frantic gasps for air as her body shook too hard for her lungs to work, for her throat to do anything but close up and her head to do anything but spin maddeningly like she was falling and drowning and being shot through the air all at once. Danny knew this, because the same thing was happening inside of him.

“It’s not regulation,” he murmured again, his voice lost in the ringing of his own ears and the sharp uneasy taste on the back of his tongue. He remembered it from the last time he had felt so lost and dizzy – there had been the barrel of a gun grinding against his molars and the smell of leather near his face. Two different inspectors. Two different people, apparently. But for the first time Danny was wondering how different his father and his… his friend really were. Nicholas was meant to be spending his days behind a desk, though he rarely ever did. Not that anyone ever questioned it. Not that anyone ever seemed to wonder how far he would stray to come up with answers.

Danny slipped out the door and made a break for home.


	4. Week End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Danny does a lot of thinking; Nicholas does too much thinking; and there's a difference between things being revealed, and things being resolved.

Danny was late into work, and despite his ducked head and the long slink towards his desk, no one called him on it. He rolled in his desk chair over to where Doris was sitting at her own desk, staring into space.

“What’d I miss yesterday?” he asked in a whisper.

“Full confession,” Doris replied dully. “Then we brought Greg Tanner in, and after he got sick of yelling he came out with something that’s probably also a confession.” She turned bright eyes onto Danny at last, although Danny wished that she hadn’t. “They put her in the compost heap,” she whispered.

Danny closed his eyes and put his head in his hands. Doris patted him on the back, and they both spent a moment just breathing. “Andy’s down there now with the coroner from Buford,” Doris continued. “Walker too.”

“Paperwork?” Danny asked, traitorously hopeful.

“Andrew’s typing up the interviews,” Doris replied in the same distant, plodding voice, “and Nicholas has everything else under control. Until they find her, at least.”

“Righ’,” Danny said. He remembered the fuzzy, vacant feeling inside his head from his first memories of hospital. Nicholas had finally come in, sunburnt and shell-shocked. “A month ago I was a constable,” he had said dully. “And now I’m not, and I don’t know what to do.” Danny hadn’t understood at the time – because it was Nicholas, and Nicholas always knew what to do – but sitting beside Doris and joining her in staring at nothing, he understood the longing to not have to worry about the sergeant stripes that were weighing down his shoulders, dragging him through the carpet and into the earth below. He longed for things to be simple and mindless like they were. Across the room, a cracked photograph of a family that hadn’t existed for a long time stared at him damningly for taking so long.

“It must be horrible,” Doris said at last in her cracked voice, “living like that.”

“What? In a compost heap?”

Doris snorted, then shoved Danny in the shoulder as if she hadn’t. “No; living the kind of life where a babe goes missing and the first thing you do is suspect the parents.”

Danny blinked. And then he turned to stare at Nicholas in his office. A solid island of debris in the turbulent waters of Sandford. Except, now that Danny looked close and hard and critically, he could see the same tired slump of the shoulders that adorned them all, the same confused furrow of his brow. Staring at the telephone on his desk, as if praying for London to call. Nicholas had more stripes to weigh him down, but he still didn’t know what to do, and in that Danny recognised yet another failing on his own behalf.

*

It was after lunch, at least, when Nicholas rapped his knuckles on his doorframe. “Get Tony and Andy in here,” he said sternly. Danny was pleased to have the distraction from uneasy introspection, but noticeably less pleased when Nicholas shut the office door behind his two senior officers. Doris slumped down to one side of the door, her head angled to the little vent at the bottom. Since Nicholas had given him no other choice, Danny joined her.

“Is this how it’s meant to go?” Nicholas asked. He sounded tired. Bone tired. Danny wouldn’t be at all surprised if he hadn’t gone home last night.

“What do you mean?” Andrew replied. “It’s going the way it always should have gone. We got the bad guys, so we follow through for once.”

“We have a confession that won’t hold up in court,” Nicholas replied.

“Greg’s will,” Tony said, “I think.”

“And we’ve got the body being recovered,” Andrew chipped in. “That’s, what, manslaughter for one, conspiracy for both of them, and then the one about being dicks to the police.”

“Obstruction?” Tony offered.

“Yeah, that’s the ticket. All up, it’s probably one of the easiest cases we’ve dealt with this past year.”

Nicholas sighed. When Nicholas sighed you could feel everyone else stagger a little under the weight of it. “You think that it’s going to be easy, do you? Making that kind of arrest in this town? Again?”

“Well, I mean,” Andrew paused, and through the small vent in the door came the sounds of shifting fabric. “It might not get that much press, you know? Likely that she’ll get off, before trial even. I mean, women killers don’t really happen, do they?”

“Greg did seem a little out of it and all,” Tony agreed slowly. “Insanity plea, maybe?”

“No, we still got Greg,” Andrew insisted.

“No, we don’t,” Nicholas said dully.

“Not until we get Lyn- the body, that is,” Tony chimed in.

Nicholas’ voice was so quiet that Danny and Doris had the harsh metal of the grate cutting into their ears as they pressed against it. “Do we really want to find her?”

There was the crackle of pants and the thud of feet as Andrew paced. “They can’t get off,” he said at last. “There’s no way we can let this go. Nicholas,” an angry plea crept into Andrew’s voice, “you can’t let them get away…”

“Their daughter died, Andy,” Nicholas said gently. “They’ll never get away from that. Everything else…”

“We’ll get Rory away from them,” Tony said firmly. “That should be easy enough, right? And then…”

“And then we’ll still charge them,” Andrew said firmly. “Make sure it gets to court. And we’ll just have to find enough. Find enough to nail them, right Pain-in-the-arse?”

There was a stony silence where Nicholas’ agreement should have been.

“We just need the girl,” Tony said gently. “We get her, and we get Rory out, and after that it’s out of our hands.”

There was a long pause. Too long.

“I’m sorry,” Nicholas said at last, his voice muffled as if he had a hand to his face. “I need to make a personal call.”

Danny stayed beside the door, even after Tony and Andrew had filed out like sulking storm clouds, even after Doris scurried after them and created a knot of concerned whispers. He heard Nicholas pick the phone up, and get halfway through dialling before slamming the handset down.

*

Danny had spent most of his life not having access to the right words, not knowing what to say, or how to say it, or what to do with his hands. Standing beside Nicholas at the edge of a flower bed, watching a tiny bag carrying a tinnier body be move away, watching the Turners and the Andes crouch down with rubber gloves and steel tweezers and tiny little plastic bottles, Danny was trying very hard to pretend that he wasn’t wishing that it was his father standing beside him, that Nicholas didn’t know it.

“You sleep last night?” He said at last.

“No,” Nicholas replied from around his thumb nail. He pulled his hand away from his mouth, looking immediately like it had never been there in the first place. “You?”

Danny shook his head. “It’s hard – which is stupid really, given everything – but it’s hard to figure how something like this can happen.”

“Sometimes things just happen,” Nicholas said, hand by his mouth again and his mind a million miles away, “and you never understand them.”

“You feel sorry for them.” It wasn’t a question, and Nicholas didn’t answer. “I don’t know how you can. Not someone who does something like that.”

“Yes, you can,” Nicholas replied. And Danny hated him a little bit more.

*

It was late when most of the team clocked off. And it was beyond late before Danny’s hand finally cramped up and he thought to bully Nicholas out of the station. For all that Nicholas was an amazing officer, Danny suspected that he was horribly incapable of looking after himself. There was a tired softness to Nicholas, the way his shoulders were curled and his hands were shoved deep into his jacket pockets. Danny was never sure if it was because Nicholas softened when he was off duty, or just due to the tiredness of his own eyes, but the tiny lines that Danny was always tempted to count seemed to fade away a little. If only things could stay that way, suspended in the soft lens of mental exhaustion and emotional numbness. One in the morning was nature’s equivalent of smearing Vaseline on the lens. It was too hard to be completely rational in the misty hours after midnight, so easy to forgive.

“Does Tony know you’re taking Saturday off?”

Nicholas stared at the footpath being eaten up by their slow steps. “No. I haven’t gotten around to telling him.”

Danny smiled. “Does your sister even know you’re going? It’s her you’re visiting, right?”

Nicholas cleared his throat. “My dad,” he corrected dully.

“Oh.” And a few things started making sense, large puzzle pieces being locked together by a tired mind. “So you got a sister and a dad, anyone else? A brother or somethin’?”

Nicholas was silent for a little too long, stumbling slightly on the less than even footpath. “No,” he said at last, holding his front gate open and ushering Danny through.

“You’re going to be on my case about seein’ mine when you get back, aren’t you?”

Nicholas shrugged, the dark blue curves of his shoulders hard to see in the dimly lit side streets. “I will admit that it’s been a little hypocritical of me,” he admitted.

Danny laughed, because it was too late in the night and he was too tired to do anything else but shake his head and feel the warm night breeze across his face as Nicholas fumbled with his keys. “Look,” he said, following Nicholas into the familiar front hall, “if not getting on with your dad upsets you so much, why don’t you suck it up and just make it right already?”

Nicholas shrugged out of his jacket, his face turned away. “It’s not that simple, Danny.”

“Bollocks to that,” Danny said firmly. “Go call him, right now. And you sort it out.”

Nicholas slumped against the doorframe, a bleak figure with his face turned away. Danny wished that he knew the story behind that posture, that there wasn’t so much about Nicholas that he could never hope to be sure of. Nicholas sounded very tired when he spoke. “He’s not going to pick up.”

Danny crossed his arms and leant against the closed front door. “So leave a message. If anything, that’ll make it easier,” he insisted, trying to ignore the way his own words were echoing around inside his head. “Look Nick, after all your nagging this week, you’ve got to know that it’s not too late to fix things, okay?”

Nicholas didn’t say anything, but obligingly grabbed his cordless phone off its charger and sulked into his living room. Danny stared after him, into the blank bleak space where Nicholas had been. He kicked his heel against the scuffed carpet in the hallway and tried to think about anything and everything that didn’t involve him feeling like a bad friend and a worse son. At last he swore and went to make a note on the back of his hand – “Dad prick, call n.e.way” – but after a day of doodles and duty his pen had finally run out. He patted his pockets, and then tried Nicholas’ jacket. He could hear the cautious mumble of Nick in the next room.

“Dad, it’s me. Look, I know you’re not going to pick up, so…”

Danny smiled to himself. Nicholas was a lot of things, but he wasn’t exactly capable of taking his own advice. Danny felt around on the top of the phone table, came up empty, and tried the little drawer at the front. It slid open with a rattle of pens, but pens were suddenly far from the front of Danny’s thoughts. It was the bit of paper, the one with his name on it, staring back at him from inside the drawer.

“I know we’ve had our… not differences. Even when we agreed on something, we still argued. I know that I let you down, joining the police service. You thought I was picking Derek over you. Which is… I’ve told you so many times how stupid that is. But that never stopped you from believing it, I guess.”

Danny snuck a look over his shoulder, and then gently lifted the piece of paper out of the drawer. He unfolded it, and tried to smooth it out as quietly as possible. It was a letter, hardly more than a note. Dated on Monday.

“You were the one who taught me what was right and wrong, not Derek. I thought… I thought that if I just worked hard enough, did enough good you’d finally realise that it was about... I just wanted to make things better. I just-”

Danny felt his heart pound as he skimmed Nicholas’ slanting handwriting, and then he felt something in his chest burn.

“I wanted you to be proud of me.”

D, my father died last night. Funeral on Sat, back after then. Look after Sandford for me, N.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t a better son.”

Danny sat down beside Nicholas, note still in hand. There was a suffocating awkwardness caused by too many things being felt at once. Nicholas’ eyes were red.

“You knew since Monday,” Danny said eventually. “You were going to go, but you stayed.”

Nicholas nodded. “I didn’t want to leave with the Tanner case just starting.”

“We could have handled it.”

Nicholas smiled sadly, and looked at the phone in his hands. “I didn’t want to leave at all.”

Danny shook his head. “Despite all the evidence, it always surprises me that you’re so hopeless.”

Nicholas held his head up with one hand, elbow on the arm of the couch. “I’m secretly very good at denial,” he admitted. “I think you need to be, with some things.”

“With some things,” Danny agreed with a nod. “I’ll stay here tonight. Make sure you actually get to London in the morning.”

“Thank you,” Nicholas said hoarsely. “For making me call him, too.” Nicholas looked down, playing with the silent phone in his hands. “I’m never going to know, am I? What he would have said?”

Danny’s mouth curled into the kind of smile that would have been a laugh if he hadn’t felt so torn up inside. “He’s your father, Nick. Of course you know.”

Nicholas smiled, and scrubbed a hand over his face. “Yeah,” he said, slumping at last back into his couch and turning his head to look at Danny. “Still, after this past week, I don’t think I’m up to uncovering any more hidden truths for a while.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Danny, staring at the thin shape of Nicholas’ mouth. “I’m sure we’ll get to all the important ones eventually.”


End file.
